This is Hook's Walk, the little winding street I take between Bishop Bridge and Cathedral Close on my lunchtime perambulations into the city. This view is looking back from the Cathedral toward the river.
Last week's heatwave may have been stupidly sweaty and unpleasant but it sure made for some sweet photo opportunities.
12 comments:
I love that picture, Dive. It gives me some reference to the way in which people live their lives. This seems homey, unpretentious. A question: Since some of the buildings are very old, what is the scale of them for 21st century people --such as a 6-foot man or a 5"7' woman? How can you change them, if necessary?
I love this little walk... raining now so nice to see sunny pics...
Thanks for yesterday...
Speedway you can not change them in any way, shape or form. They are as beautiful inside as out, though of course (having lived in a fourteenth century house for a while I speak with the voice of experience) you're going to spend a lot of your time concussed from low beams on the upper floors and the floors are so uneven you need to jack your furniture up at the corners. They're also impossibly cold in the winter and have teeny-tiny little kitchenette/bathroom arrangements in outshots at the back. Any idiot wanting to put in an ensuite or central heating or a big kitchen would be strung up by the neck and rightly so. Most buildings in the Close have been there since the twelfth century in some for or other; the residents are merely custodians for the short periods of their lives. It's not easy living in an old house but it's worth it.
Mum, we'll wander round the Close again next Spring when the weather's better. If you bring Phyllis next time, be sure to fit her with roller skates or put her on a trolley so we can actually get some walking done.
Ha ha as long as this back gets better will love it!!!
I would like a £1 for every time one of us knocked our heads on beams...
Me, too. I ascribe my memory loss and baldness to those beams along the landing.
Hook's Walk is an interesting name. How was it named?
They were built in the 12th Century -- amazing!
Boring must be the new beautiful.
Presumably after a person called Hook, Ms.M.
The lower portions of just about every building in the Close date from 1068 or not long thereafter. The house to the left of the cream one (just out of the picture, but I've featured it before) is almost all original and was the brewhouse for the construction workers on the Cathedral. The cream house has a fourteenth century great hall (like Dragon Hall) hidden inside it. All the houses have had floors added over the centuries and many sets of new and contrasting windows, and some have Georgian brick fronts added (you can see a couple further down the walk).
Over the centuries they have reached a state of higgledy-piggledy confusion that is quite beautiful, so these days we have a policy of repair and restore, rather than ruin the beauty with cheap, factory-made windows and fitted kitchens.
Lucio, I've been dreaming of that moment for decades but it's never yet happened to me.
No, it happened: just after you were born. :-)
Lucio, the only beautiful thing that happened when I was born was Miles Davis recording Kind of Blue. But then that's probably one of the most beautiful and definitely one of the coolest events in the history of mankind so I'm not complaining.
Lovely neighborhood and I so agree with you on Kind of Blue!
Yup, Jesus had a star to mark his birth but Kind of Blue is so much cooler.
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